Just Say Yes

Gathered in a small, windowless room down the hall from West High
School’s gym on a chilly December afternoon, Shawn Price, Lance
Gummersall, and Tom Olsen relive highlights from last night’s
basketball game. Price is teased for a failed “no look”
pass, and Olsen, who also runs cross country for the Salt Lake City
school, gets ribbed for constantly sprinting up and down the court.
Laughter fills the room, warming it more than the faulty heater that
struggles against the cold air creeping in under the door.

As the wisecracking continues, about 10 more teammates arrive. But
the chatter subsides as Chad Drecksel, West High’s track coach,
begins the session. He asks everyone whether they met yesterday’s
personal goal—to eat well—and bemoans the lackluster
responses. Still, the teenagers seem primed for today’s
assignment, which is to write newspaper-style pieces on one of the
following subjects: drugs, exercise, nutritional supplements, or smart
food choices. The boys split into groups, toss around ideas, and start
composing. One group yuks it up with a mock article about a corpse
found behind a fast-food restaurant. The cause of death? Obesity
brought on by too many cheeseburgers.

This exercise is part of the ATLAS, or Athletes Training and
Learning to Avoid Steroids, program, which encourages male high school
athletes to forgo any form of drug or alcohol use in favor of healthful
alternatives. Over the course of 10 45-minute sessions, a faculty
adviser and peer lead-ers supervise a number of playful activities,
such as throwing balls at “Steroid Man” and picking apart
bodybuilding ads, while focusing on exercise and nutrition as means to
develop speed, size, and endurance. “You have to give them
something they can use,” notes Linn Goldberg, the program’s
creator. “We aren’t saying steroids don’t
work—because they do. But there are much safer and better ways to
get the same results.”

Goldberg, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science
University, pilot tested ATLAS a few years ago and then, at the
suggestion of drug-prevention experts at the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, worked with a publisher to promote the program
nationwide. Since 1999, it’s been used in more than 25 states,
but until recently, Goldberg didn’t have the resources necessary
to track the number of schools using ATLAS or how well they implement
it. Now, with $150,000 in federal funding, he’s launched an
effort to monitor its implementation in several locations, including
the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. “The whole world’s
focus is on Salt Lake City,” he says, more than a month before
the games are set to begin.

Goldberg’s primary aim is to draw attention to the problems
associated with performance-enhancing drugs. Steroids, research shows,
can cause cardiovascular disease and other serious side effects,
including stunted growth, yet they remain popular among young athletes.
A 1999 Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association survey found that 60
percent of teens interviewed knew athletes their age who used steroids
and similar substances. And a growing number of kids are attracted to
nutritional supplements, which some health experts claim are
potentially dangerous. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration has linked the energy booster ephedrine to incidents of
heart attack, stroke, and seizure.

ATLAS, Goldberg says, has curbed drug use among its participants,
and he has the numbers to prove it. He’s also backed by the U.S.
Department of Education, which cites the program as exemplary.
Nevertheless, ATLAS is not without its drawbacks. In Salt Lake City,
for example, it got off to a rough start when coaches at various high
schools resisted its launch, in part, because they found the program
time-consuming.

But the basketball players gathered at West High this afternoon are
enthusiastic about ATLAS. In one group, the kids throw themselves into
creating their fictitious restaurant, where every tablespoon of mayo
applied to a cheeseburger adds a whopping 99 calories. Later, Shawn
Price says he’s tried to limit his own fast-food consumption. He
now passes up the hamburger joints most students patronize for
healthier selections at Subway or a local Italian sandwich shop.

He’s also noticed a difference in his athletic performance
since he started the program just a few weeks ago. He recently played a
full game against Mountain Crest but says he could have gone longer. At
times over the past couple of years, he admits, he considered trying
steroids. Not anymore. “I didn’t realize they could be bad
for you even after you’ve stopped taking them,” he notes.
“[ATLAS] has made me take a second look at everything.”

Goldberg developed the ATLAS program after coaches at public schools
not far from Oregon Health Sciences University began asking if his
medical students could talk to teens they suspected were using
steroids. With a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a
division of the National Institutes of Health), he tested the program
at 31 Oregon and Washington high schools between 1994 and 1996. A year
later, he reported that there’d been a 50 percent drop in the
number of participants who started taking steroids and a decline in
their use of drugs and alcohol.

In 1999, Sunburst Press began publishing and distributing the ATLAS
materials: three student workbooks and a scripted teacher’s
guide. Included in their pages are explanations of how steroid use can
lead to liver cancer, shrunken testicles, stroke, and other problems.
One workbook breaks exercise routines into colorful categories, such as
“sport utility training” for endurance and “truck
training” for strength. “We try to use humor,” says
Goldberg. “We want it to be fun.”

The ATLAS
program encourages male high school athletes to forgo any form of
drug or alcohol use in favor of healthful
alternatives.

Timothy Condin, an associate director at NIDA, is a fan of ATLAS. The
program works, he says, because it’s led by students and coaches,
not guest lecturers. “It helps change the culture in the athletic
departments about what is acceptable,” he explains.
“Changing the norm in their environment is one of the hardest
things to do, and you can’t just depend on outside information to
do it.”

West High is one of three Salt Lake City schools that have agreed to
participate in Goldberg’s latest experiment—in part because
the mayor, Rocky Anderson, is also a fan of the program—and,
after nine sessions, coach Drecksel’s students are waiting in the
hallway for their last workshop to begin. Some are actually finishing
up yesterday’s homework. Each teenager was told to ask five girls
to look at several photos and select the most attractive male. The
choices included two hulking muscle men, a slim cross-country runner,
and a moderately toned athlete with “six pack” abs. Most
picked the guy with the rippled stomach, and all rejected the
bulging-bicep pinups, the kind of guys bodybuilding ads insist women
really want.

Once the session gets under way, the peer leaders, Lance Gummersall
and Tom Olsen—who were trained by Drecksel—take turns
directing the class. Although many of the athletes are seniors and
Gummersall’s only a junior, they respect him and listen intently.
He says later that he never felt his teammates resented the fact that
he was playing teacher. “We don’t really tell them what to
do—that helps,” he explains. “We’re just
leading the discussions.”

Of course, letting kids supervise a class has potential drawbacks,
mostly because a lot rides on their enthusiasm. Generally, the West
High peer leaders take their job seriously, but it does have its perks;
they get to skip the exercises, for example. “That is the best
part,” says Gummersall, who at times looks more bored than
inspiring. “You don’t have to do all the work, and you get
to get out of class for the training.”

Coaches like Drecksel also carry responsibility for making ATLAS
work, helping the students run the class and making sure they cover the
material on time. At five-feet-nine-inches, Drecksel is smaller than
most of the athletes he teaches, and he’s soft-spoken. Still, the
kids pay attention to him. When he asks the group to come up with
benefits of various weight-training techniques, they respond quickly,
shouting out answers such as “explosive power” and
“muscular endurance.”

Although Drecksel is pro-ATLAS now, he and other Salt Lake coaches
were skeptical at first, and some failed to implement the program last
spring as originally planned. Rod Miner, West High’s athletic
director, attributes the resistance to the district’s shoddy
introduction of the program. “We had it shoved down our throats
without any explanation or reasons,” he complains. “The
coaches are also supposed to use practice time for this, and a lot
don’t want to give that time up.” Now, though, Drecksel
says he and others don’t mind making the necessary sacrifices for
ATLAS. “We know it works,” he explains.

It may work, but some aspects of the program can be expensive. If
coaches want to be trained, for example, ATLAS staff charge $1,000 or
more, depending on the number of trainees. And the price of the
workbooks for one teacher and 10 students is $150. But Goldberg knows
many school budgets are tight. He says coaches can skip the training
and simply follow the scripted teacher’s guide. In addition, the
workbooks are not copyrighted for a reason; if they want to, educators
can photocopy them.

ATLAS, Goldberg says, has curbed drug use among its participants,
and he has the numbers to prove it.

At West High, the athletes appreciate the dietary aspects of the
program more than any other. Surprisingly, they say they had little
nutrition education in previous classes, including health. “It
has changed how our whole family is eating,” says Tanner
Nicholson, a lanky sophomore with a big Afro. “I snack a lot
differently, and my dad is even looking through the books, figuring out
what he should be eating.”

This is the kind of effect Goldberg always hoped ATLAS would have.
And several years of what he deems success have inspired him to develop
similar programs. He’s currently testing ATHENA, or Athletes
Targeting Healthy Exercise and Nutrition Alternatives, a program for
female athletes that focuses on eating disorders and other problems.
Eventually, he’d like to launch a program for all
students—Gender Associated Learning in Lifestyle and Exercise
Opportunities, or GALILEO for short. He’s now applying for a
grant to develop it.

Meanwhile, the basketball players at West High are enjoying their
last few minutes of the ATLAS program. Many take the opportunity to
munch on snacks they’ve brought from home, most of which are
healthful, such as bagels, pudding, and fruit. But Olsen, after he
downs some pudding, breaks out a Snickers bar. He leans back in his
chair while the class answers 34 questions in a review of the program.
Most of the guys get the answers right—they know a few
high-protein foods and the effects of alcohol on the body, for example.
In fact, the only question that really stumps them is, “What does
ATLAS stand for?”

The review finished, the program’s officially over. A few
cheers go up, and some kids joke that they’d rather continue
ATLAS than head to basketball practice. In truth, Olsen is itching to
get on the court; he’s hoping to win a college basketball
scholarship. But he’s glad he participated in the program.
Despite a Snickers bar here and there, he says he’s tried to
change his diet, eating less junk food and more chicken and tuna and
drinking milk every day. “I eat the same bad stuff,” he
notes with a slight smile, “but just not as much.”

Lya Wodraska is a sportswriter for the Salt Lake Tribune in Salt
Lake City.

Visit the ATLAS
program at the Oregon Health
and Science University. The program "targets male adolescent
athletes use of anabolic steroids, alcohol and other drugs and use of
sport supplements, while improving healthy nutrition and exercise
practices." An overview of the
program has been posted, along with further information on steroids and their
physiological effects on young athletes.

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